


Pineville, KY

by theladyscribe



Category: World War Z - Max Brooks
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-18
Updated: 2012-12-18
Packaged: 2017-11-21 10:13:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/596519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theladyscribe/pseuds/theladyscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was some laughter about the damn Yankees getting their panties in a twist over another version of pig flu, probably just another Democrat attempt to control everybody's lives, that sort of thing. It wasn't until the showdown at Yonkers that people realized it was serious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pineville, KY

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kynical](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kynical/gifts).



> Many thanks to B for the beta work!

**Pineville, KY**

**[Pineville used to be a mining town in southeastern Kentucky. The town was wedged between Pine Mountain and the Cumberland River, with a dike protecting most of the city from flooding. According to government records, the place looked like a fortress even before the War. Three gates in the floodwall allowed access, two of which were connected to the Cumberland Highway, the other of which connected to a bridge that crossed the river. These days, the south entrance is the only one open, and it is here that I meet Natalie Hollingsworth.**

**Natalie is a tall woman, thin, but straight-backed. On top of the flood wall, sentries keep an eye on both of us, hunting rifles held loosely in their arms. She leads me inside the walled city, the floodgate swinging closed behind us. I can feel the eyes of the sentries on me as we walk toward the city hall.]**

I hope you don't mind the honor guard.

_**Not at all. Nearly every place I've been has had them.** _

I say "honor guard," but of course, that's not what I mean. **[A tight smile.]** They're some of the best marks in the region. Were some of the best, even before. You'll have to be searched before we go any further. It's a precaution we take with all our guests. We're very cautious that no one who comes in could even possibly be infected. You understand.

**[She leads me into a guardhouse. One of the "honor guard" follows us in, his rifle casually held.**

**After the search, she finally takes me to her office in city hall.]**

Now. What would you like to know?

_**The city's story. If you don't mind.** _

Pineville was small before the war. The coal industry was dying out, slowly, painfully, especially for a part of the country too rugged to do much else. We were bleeding young people; anyone with half a chance at moving into one of the cities, doing something else, left. Pineville's population was down to less than 2,000 when we got the first reports of... unrest.

At the time, I was city manager. I was supposed to be planning Pineville's Rennaisance, finding a way to stop the quote-unquote "brain drain." **[She laughs.]** There're only so many things you can do with a walled city sandwiched between a mountain and a river that's connected to the rest of the world by a tertiary highway; expanding it isn't one of them.

I was trying to figure out how to convince the mayor and the city council that we needed to market Pineville as a niche community, a place for artists, writers, and musicians to escape to, to rejuvenate. I was young and stupid, and I had this vision of a secret Appalachian haven for hipsters. You know, so exclusive and cool you had to drive through a floodwall to get to it. I guess I kind of got what I wished for.

_**And the reports of unrest?** _

Those were just starting to come in. We weren't affected, not at first. I mean, most of the people here only ventured out to spend a weekend in Knoxville or Lexington, getting out of town so their cousins wouldn't know what they were getting for Christmas. There was some laughter about the damn Yankees getting their panties in a twist over another version of pig flu, probably just another Democrat attempt to control everybody's lives, that sort of thing. It wasn't until the showdown at Yonkers that people realized it was serious.

**[Natalie gets quiet. She stares into space for a few seconds.]**

I had friends in New York, people I'd been in school with. I still don't know... **[She shakes her head.]** That's not the story you're here for.

Being coal miners and rednecks, and proud of both these things, people around here started stocking up on everything. There was a run on the grocery stores and on the gun shops. It's ironic now, but Pineville posted the best revenues it'd had in a decade that quarter. We mostly went about our lives in the same way as we always had, but with smack talk about how we were gonna kill those bastards dead when they showed up.

And then they did show up.

They came from both sides -- down from Corbin and up from Middlesboro. A trickle at first, and then more and more. There were reports of miners being bitten in the dark while they worked and not knowing until their shift ended. There were a lot of collapses in those weeks; we still don't know if they were caused internally or if management had something to do with it. We don't actually know if they were intentional, but this is coal mining country, and we know what we're doing. It's in our blood.

Anyway, even with the loss of miners, Pineville was booming. Our population rose daily as people came in from the country. I think it's because of the wall; when the hillbillies were thinking of places that might be safe, they thought of us. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that our ancestors were Western Europeans. Medieval fortresses are in our blood, same as the mining. Whatever it was, people were coming to us, some with zombies right on their heels.

We'd started closing the gates at night around the time of all the mine collapses. Not everyone was convinced at that point that it wasn't a government conspiracy to murder us specifically and the mayor decided a curfew would give people something to focus on. He was also the one who organized the first patrols, getting people to take shifts on the wall, watching for both refugees and zombies.

The number of refugees began to slow to a trickle, and the number of zombies reported rose steadily. The last refugees we allowed in looked like meth-heads, but it was just that they'd been running for days on end, no time to even think about food or sleep, not with the groans of the undead behind them.

Everyone who came in was inspected thoroughly. Miraculously, we never let in the infected, not even in the early days, when we didn't even know what we were looking for.

**_No infected? At all?_ **

**[She shrugs.]** There were a few who came to us with wounds. The honor guard handled them.

**_I see. How did you handle the population explosion?_ **

It was pretty obvious we weren't getting any assistance from the government. Not that we'd expect any, never mind whether we would have accepted it. The city workers organized our new population into groups according to skill: we had miners, we had farmers, we had manual laborers. There were the city folk, of course, the dentists and doctors and lawyers, but most of the people around here grew gardens in the spring and hunted game in the fall. We were the children of survivors and survivors ourselves. It wasn't too difficult to expand our resources.

Meanwhile, the outside world was a nightmare. We were still getting some satellite feeds at that point, but we didn't need them to know things were getting worse. We only had to listen to the groans outside our walls at night.

**_You didn't try to kill them?_ **

Our mayor was a military man, a tactician if there ever was one. He pointed out -- rightly -- that if we shot them, they'd just pile up, eventually piling high enough to get inside. We were far better off leaving them outside, groaning. Not everyone agreed, of course, but if you wanted to leave, the only way was to go over the wall. No one ever asked to go.

**_What about the bridges?_ **

**[Natalie's expression hardens, and she stares at me for several minutes.]** I should have known you would ask about that.

_**You don't have to --** _

No, I suppose it's part of it, too. The groans were bad, and people were angry. They wanted to do something about it, to fight back. Really, they wanted it to end.

Someone pointed out that the mines still had dynamite, and that we could, maybe, blast the zombies away. Whatever idiot suggested that obviously had never been a miner himself. But this idea of blasting our way out of the mess stuck. Finally, the mayor agreed that we could at least get ourselves some distance from the zombies by blocking off the roads into town.

The plan was for two groups to go, to blast the bridges on the north and east sides of town; they decided to leave the south entrance open so we'd have some way to get out if the nightmare ever ended.

We all knew it was suicide, but the mayor asked for volunteers anyway. There were nine volunteers, and he made the tenth. They decided they'd go at first light, thinking, I guess, that maybe the zombies would be less active after a night in the cold.

**[Natalie purses her lips and looks down at her hands. The gold ring on her left hand glints in the sunlight from the window.]**

When I kissed my husband goodbye, he had a makeshift bomb strapped to his chest.


End file.
